


Second Wind

by minkhollow



Category: Sneakers
Genre: Gen, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-02
Updated: 2009-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-02 04:05:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minkhollow/pseuds/minkhollow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As long as there are businesses, there will be people who want to undermine them.  But sometimes, everyone involved has to move with the times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Wind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kyburg for Yuletide 2008; thanks to Quinby for the beta-read.  
> Characters/setting belong to Universal Pictures, not me.

Bishop was right, in one of his comments at that bank sneak before Cosmo showed up. The other guys are getting too old for this - other than Mother, who's generally too paranoid to do the part that involves running around inside, so that's not much help.

Carl's pretty sure Bishop was joking, when he said that, but it's still pretty clear that he was right. Carl's been doing more of the fast inside work since then. He doesn't blame Bishop and Crease for needing to slow down, not in the least, but - well, there's only so much of this he can do by himself.

They're probably going to have to find more people, to keep the business going beyond the foreseeable future. Where they're going to find anyone else, never mind fit them into the already-tight budget, Carl has no idea, so he doesn't mention it.

After all, considering how the other guys found him, they just might stumble across the right person by accident.

***

It doesn't take very long at all for Carl to mistrust America Online. He's not about to leave the ISP he found, since it's not a bad deal at all for what he needs, but it's always a good idea to know what the competition looks like, so he digs up some information.

Sure, there's a lot to be said for bringing the Internet to the world at large, rather than just the government. But their Terms of Service are incredibly restrictive, the idea of charging for the service by the hour would bankrupt him in about two weeks at the outside, and from what he can find out, they don't seem very prepared for working on a network that's not tied to phone lines, if that ever becomes an option.

And then there's the little matter of how badly the AOL people handle Usenet. They couldn't use it properly if the protocol hit them upside the head, so far as there's protocol for much of anything on the Internet.

It does get him thinking, though. With access opening up to more and more people, this thing's primed to explode into prominence. That means there will be businesses that want to establish an online presence, if not businesses that are primarily the online presence. And there are definitely people out there who will see this giant network as a challenge, as something to break down and turn to their own ends.

Carl would be one of those people, if it weren't his job to stop them. He's good at thinking ahead, when it comes to computers; it's part of what got him in so much trouble in high school. (Of course, that got him into the best job in the universe, so it had its plusses.)

He'll have to think it over and figure out how to sell the idea at work.

***

Bishop's skeptical, when Carl first brings up the idea, but he'd half expected this to be a tough sell.

"Look at it this way. We could do all of that work from here. Saves you guys the trouble of all that running around."

"I don't know, Carl. There's not much of a market for this."

Carl shrugs. "Not now, maybe. But I'd say the odds are good there will be. And you'll end up with people who wouldn't think to set secure passwords on their information on their own, and large monetary exchanges, and all the usual stuff."

"Probably true, considering how often we see the same mistakes in ordinary business."

"Exactly. Can't hurt to be the first people there, can it?"

"I'll have to think about it," Bishop says, but the pause before he does tells Carl the idea's probably going to be a go. Even if it takes a while to build up to, they'll probably branch out to virtual security testing before the end of the year.

***

Carl's not dating Mary anymore, but they still talk sometimes; both of them need to talk to somebody they don't work with, every now and then. It's good for their respective sanity.

As time goes by, Mary has more and more stories about the government trying to track down people who coded computer viruses. That only tells Carl he was on the right track with suggesting the guys get into the virtual business early.

That's going anything but smoothly, of course. There's less Whistler can do to help, Crease doesn't have a natural knack for computers, Mother's worried about how many people might be able to track him down through these things, and Bishop... well, he's got his own reservations about the whole thing, not to mention most of his knowledge base is about thirty years out of date. Still, they're making some headway on how to go about virtual sneaks, and more people are asking for them.

It's giving Carl an idea for how he can stay in this business when the other guys have to stop, even if he can't find other people to do the face-to-face work.

***

There's really not much else Carl could do for a living, other than what he's doing now. It's an unfortunate side effect of being expelled from high school; since Bishop offered him a job after reporting his hacking exploits to the principal, Carl never bothered formally finishing his education. Besides, with a black mark like that, he's not sure anyone else would want to keep him around.

So really, it's just as well he likes being paid to hack into things and occasionally pretend to be someone else. He may have fallen into the best possible job for his skill set by accident, but it's turned out pretty well, all things considered.

He knows there's no way in hell that running a business is actually as easy as Bishop makes it look - something to keep in mind, since Carl's most likely either taking over this one or striking out on his own, eventually. Between that and the code noodling he's got to do for the virtual sneaks, he comes up with a few programs that might make life a little easier, once he gets to that point.

The dot-com boom's got them in pretty good shape, all things considered. Since they already took the time to feel out the trickier bits of online security testing, they're in good shape to handle those requests, when they come in. That reputation for starting prepared gets around, and has an unexpected bonus: Job offers are coming in from companies based on the other side of the country, who claim they can't find comparable service closer to home.

It's pretty good, even though they all laugh at the one from the music industry wanting help to slow down file-sharing. Carl would love to point out that there's really nothing lost unless someone's selling the files, in which case people wouldn't really call it sharing, but he doubts they would listen.

***

By the time Bishop decides he really is too old to keep working, Carl's got nearly ten years of experience in the field, the dot-com boom is looking more like a bubble every day, and the consequences of bankrupting the Republican Party are really making themselves felt.

Of course, they sort of did four years ago, since there wasn't anyone organized enough to effectively challenge Clinton's try for a second term, but this election's a lot more interesting to watch. There are three candidates on the table - three major candidates, that is, along with the usual handful of people who don't get much press - and one of them's actually running on middle-of-the-road policies.

If Carl had to guess, he'd say McCain's going to pull this one off. But naturally, the only way to find out is to see it through on election night.

In any case, he was right that running a business is nowhere near easy. He's always been one for a good challenge, though, and he can bounce ideas off the guys any time he needs to.

When he starts looking for more people, he almost asks Mary, but decides against it. She enjoys what she's doing, and it's probably better for both of them that they're not doing the same job; makes it easier for them to gripe about work, for one thing. He does ask if he can call her for more free-range advice, if he needs to, and she's fine with that idea.

Carl does find a few more people who are good at the job, both the real-life and virtual aspects. He figures there's no harm in doing real-life security testing, as long as people want it done, and for all the dot-com bubble is beginning to burst, the demand for virtual sneaks isn't going away entirely.

But that only makes sense, really. As long as there are businesses, there will be people who want to undermine them, so someone's got to figure out how to stop them before they succeed.

It's not easy, but Carl wasn't expecting easy. He was expecting interesting, and that, at least, shouldn't ever be any trouble.


End file.
